Saturday 21 Dec 2013, 7:30pmThéâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris

Based on the true story of a group of persecuted nuns during the French Revolution, Poulenc’s second opera Les Dialogues des Carmelites is arguably the composer’s masterpiece. Poulenc famously declared ‘my music is my portrait’, and in Dialogues’s wrenching drama and allusions to both modern and sacred musical structures, it has been suggested that the work alludes to the composer’s own concerns on the condition and future of his native France. Whatever the intention, however, the work was widely praised when it premièred at Milan's Teatro alla Scala in 1957, and continues to receive adulation whenever it is performed (the New York Times recently describing the Dialogues as ‘restrained yet lush, refined yet wrenching’).